Another disappointing day for McLaren Honda at Barcelona

The damp weather pushed the emphasis onto aerodynamic testing, but this was cut short by a failure of the revised seal introduced today in a bid to resolve the week’s MGU-K issues.

To compound a tricky day, Jenson suffered a punctured Intermediate tyre during a practice pitstop, coming to a halt before the end of the pitlane.

Date: Saturday February 21 2015
Driver: Jenson Button
Location: Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya (4.655km)
Laps/km: 24/111km
Best lap-time: 1m29.151s

Jenson Button: “Yesterday wasn’t bad, with more mileage and lots of data gathered, but today’s been tricky – it hasn’t been my day. We had a similar problem to the one we faced on Thursday, with the faulty MGU-K seal, so the afternoon running was limited to aero testing and pitstop practice.

“I still can’t comment on where the car will be when everything is running smoothly, as I haven’t had the chance to run it properly without meeting problems. Having said that, I feel like there’s definitely nothing wrong with the car or any stand-out issues with driveability. You jump in the car and everything feels good.

“Hopefully, our problems will be solved sooner rather than later, but tomorrow is still likely to be a reasonably difficult day. There’s a lot for us to improve at the moment – we’ve still got five days of testing left, so hopefully they’ll be five good days.”

What’s next... Final day of this test. Tomorrow, the team will try another fix to the on-going MGU-K issue. With the lack of mileage recorded so far this week, the programme for tomorrow remains relatively open-ended.

McLaren Honda